Earth Day: Big and little ways Mayway contributes to a better environment
Our products travel almost half way around the Earth to get to you, and we are always conscious of this fact. We are mindful of not wasting, being efficient, and using as little packaging and packing materials as possible. We proudly make our products in China for many reasons—they are made as bona fide medicines that are used in hospitals and clinics, the herbs used are geo-authentic, effective and fresher (for example, the huang qi, dang gui, and dang shen used in our Plum Flower®, Bamboo Pharmacy®, and Min Shan® teapills are from our manufacturer's own farm), and by making them there we actually leave a smaller carbon footprint.
Our manufacturers waste as little as possible, composting or using as animal feed hundreds of tons of herb dregs each year.
The farmers we work with take great pride in being responsible stewards of their land and engage in all manner of sustainable farming practices, including weeding by hand, rotating crops seasonally or annually, and inter-cropping, whereby different crops are planted amongst each other in the same field to produce shade, deter pests, and extract and add different nutrients to the soil when it's turned or allowed to lie fallow.
We work with them to reduce their use of pesticides and to choose safer, better biodegradable ones when they need to use them to save their crops. Also, because Mayway was the first to specialize in providing unsulfured herbs just over twenty years ago, we shook up the industry by mandating that the farmers and suppliers of our herbs not fumigate herbs with sulfur dioxide. Even then, we saw that sulfuring was harmful to herb quality and the environment. Sulfur dioxide fumigation has been shown to change the cellular and chemical structure of the fumigated product, harm the lungs of workers doing the sulfuring, and contributes to acid rain.
Here at Mayway's headquarters in the U.S., we support environmental awareness internally by always adhering to the standards of being a certified Green Business, recycling and using only reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable packing materials, and generally generating as little trash as possible. We keep our solar panels clean to maximize the amount of energy we create. We consolidate shipments to minimize the space and fuel used in ocean shipping.
We believe that respect for the Earth begins internally and locally, so in honor of Earth Day, for the week of April 18-22 we will donate a percentage of sales to a local urban farm "City Slicker's Farm" here in our own West Oakland neighborhood, where they also honor the locavore model, distributing fresh produce at its most nutritious to the community nearby.
